Category Archives: Featured


Making a simple weather web server using ESP8266 and BME280

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Since its launch in 2014, ESP8266 has revolutionized the IoT space by offering an extremely cost-effective and programmable WiFi-enabled microcontroller to hobbyists and professionals, thereby opening the doors to all kinds of everyday objects and sensors to the internet. In addition, with it’s built-in WiFi capability, the ESP8266 can also serve as a standalone web server on a local network, and can respond to the http GET commands received from an internet browser. This project illustrates how to construct a simple standalone weather web server utilizing NodeMCU development board for ESP8266 and Bosch’s BME280 environmental sensor chip. On receiving the web requests, the ESP8266

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ChipKIT Project 6: BME280 Weather Station

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BME280 is a fully integrated environmental unit from Bosch that combines sensors for pressure, humidity, and temperature in a tiny 8-pin metal-lid LGA package of size 2.5 x 2.5 x 0.93 mm³. Because of its compact size, ease of use (BME280 supports standard I2C and SPI interfaces), and availability of supporting open-source Arduino libraries, BME280 is very popular among weather enthusiasts. This project describes how to read barometric pressure, relative humidity, and temperature measurements from BME280 using chipKIT Uno32 to make a standalone weather station. The sensor readings are acquired over an I2C bus and are displayed on a Nokia 5110 LCD display.

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Bluetooth enabled portable spectrometer

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Spectrometers are widely used in scientific studies to characterize the spectral signature of a material that represents how the matter interacts with an electromagnetic radiation at different wavelengths. The spectral data contains vital information like the chemical composition and crystal structure of the material, as well as the presence of any impurities or third element within it. A commercial spectrometer costs a huge amount of money. Akshat Wahi‘s WiSci is an open-source spectrometer tool intended to allow spectroscopy accessible to everyone. With Hamamatsu’s C12666MA mini-spectrometer at the front end, WiSc collects spectral signature from a target in wavelengths ranging from 340 to 780 nm. The hardware setup includes an Arduino

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RGB matrix displays time and environmental data

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Temperature, humidity, and ambient pressure are the key parameters for environmental monitoring. With the advent of MEMS and integrated multi-sensor technologies, it’s been feasible to miniaturize environmental sensors and embed them into portable electronics. BME280 is one such fully integrated environmental unit from Bosch that combines sensors for pressure, humidity, and temperature in a tiny 8-pin metal-lid LGA package of size 2.5 x 2.5 x 0.93 mm³. This article describes how to read the environmental data from BME280 using Arduino and display the data on a 16×32 RGB matrix panel using the RGB driver shield. Things you will need Following items are used

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Retro table radio breathes new life with a Pi zero and becomes talkative

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A late 1940s DeWald table radio is given a new life by the Instructable user MisterM using a Raspberry Pi Zero, some RGB LEDs, and a pair of PC Speakers. The radio can read out notifications from various internet-connected services using Pyvona, a Python wrapper for Amazon’s IVONA text-to-speech engine along with IF This Then That (IFTTT) integration. The RGB LEDs light the radio’s dial with a different color depending on the keywords detected (Red for the word ‘YouTube’, Orange for ‘Sunset’, etc ) in the notification text. Sorting out the audio was little bit challenging because the Pi Zero does not have a

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